Is it possible to do searches for specific types of Hebrew verbal roots in Bibleworks? To compile lists of all the different occurrences?

E.g. can I pull up all the occurrences of III-א verbs? Or of II-Guttural verbs?

I'm guessing there's probably a way to do this, but I wasn't able to sniff it out.

Ben Spackman

03-28-2008, 09:32 AM

Yes, definitely.

You can either use wildcards in the search line, ie. WTM "/?w?@v* ?y?@v*" would find all hollow verbs (no quotes, of course).

For gutteral verbs, you'd have to use the either a longer version of that on the command line (one word for each gutteral in each position), use the "Define Compound Word Form" option (right click on the command line), or create a list of those word forms you want to search for, and then save that list, in the Graphical Search Engine.

Mark Cannon

03-28-2008, 10:29 AM

E.g. can I pull up all the occurrences of III-א verbs? Or of II-Guttural verbs?

To build on what Ben said,
for a a III-a verb search in the WTM type .a??@v* on the Command Line

You can search for all II-Gutturals at the same time by enclosing the guttural letters inside brackets:

for a II-Guttural verb search in the WTM type .?[[rxha]?@v*

Press the Insert key before you type your bracket and gutterals to change your input mode and allow you type the [[rxha] section of your search. Press Insert again to allow you to type the [ since it occupies the same key as the left bracket. The Command Line will drop out of the alternative input mode when you type @.

Matt Hauger

03-29-2008, 11:52 AM

Ah! Thanks for these examples; I think I'm starting to understand the command line a bit better.

Any thoughts on how to make this work for geminate verbs (e.g. סבב)? Is there way to tell Bibleworks that the last two radicals should match each other?

Ben Spackman

03-29-2008, 03:20 PM

Maybe there's an easier way to do this, but here's how I've done it in the past.

Go into the GSE, and make an inclusion list, using this form-

aa?, bb?, etc., all the way through the Hebrew alphabet. Save it as an iel list. That will let you do searches on geminate verbs.